


come with the night the science of fighting

by redledgers



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Demon Hunters, F/M, Minor Injuries, Vignette, glitter and gold is the ship name for jarett and gilmore, mentions of jarett gilmore keyleth and pike, nice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-28
Updated: 2016-12-28
Packaged: 2018-09-13 00:12:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9096664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redledgers/pseuds/redledgers
Summary: Their world is blood and demons and survival, but he will always love her and somehow she lets herself realize the same.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Critical Role Secret Santa, for whothebuckdraws on tumblr
> 
> I listened to a lot of Woodkid while I wrote this, which is why the title is pulled from the song Conquest of Spaces

There’s something about the way the blood spatters across her face in an inelegant pattern that makes him fall a little more in love with her.

 

** 

She cleans her crossbow with efficient precision, a mirror of who she is, and honestly what else can he expect of her at this point? She hadn’t been the first on board for joining up with the team that insisted on calling themselves Glitter and Gold, but nine was better than seven, and there really wasn’t space for competition. (It’s still a stupid name, even he think so, but they’re good fighters, and Jarett knew his way around a crossbow in case Vex’s broke.) If they were bounty hunters, perhaps they would’ve teamed up under different circumstances, but with a never-ending rush of demons populating the material plane, better safe than sorry.

He joins her after the recent fight, takes the oilcloth out of her hand and sets to work on his own guns, and she presses close, watching him work. She has dried black blood on her cheek, and he thinks it suits her. When he’s finished, he reaches into a pocket of his coat and pulls out a silver crossbow bolt. Where her face was tired before, now it is light, and she kisses his cheek, turning the gift in her hands. (He lives for these moments because even though the whole group is nearby, it feels like they are alone, free from a world plagued by the very things that destroyed his life, and for once, it feels truly safe.)

 

**

She comes back hurt and Pike, their medic, is out on a supply run, and he wishes there was a god he could pray to that wasn’t trying to kill them right now. (It doesn’t help that her brother won’t leave her side, fretting and pacing and getting in the way more than he’s helping.) But Gilmore happens to know a little bit about healing, and Percy can breathe a sigh of relief when she’s able to sleep more than two hours without waking up. If he sleeps closer to her when it’s his turn, no one comments, because they aren’t exactly subtle.

He gifts her with two more silver bolts when she heals completely, because even though they are few, silver is hard to come by. She puts them both in the chests of wolves and takes them back when the smoke dispels. Then she kisses the corner of his lips before slipping off to steal something from an unsuspecting martyr.

 

**

If he tells her he loves her in the middle of a fight, she pretends she doesn’t hear it because she’s not ready for that, not in this world. She’s seen him possessed; she’s seen him completely undone, and it scares her enough. (The only thing that scares her is giving her heart away because it is safer to kill things and take risks when you have no one to care about. But she cares about her brother and the dog they’d rescued, and she cares about him more than she cares to admit.) Even Scanlan won’t take risks because somewhere he has a daughter and she may need him again someday.

But she’s stolen him a book and she gives it to him when they are piled into a battered truck, lurching across destroyed roads, and he kisses her temple and tucks it away safely in his bag. She tries not to think too much, but his collected rage, his calmness in execution is too much to forget. When he burns old bloody shirts, she looks at the patterning of scars adorning his body like armor and tugs her leather jacket a little tighter before burying her fingers in Trinket’s fur.

 

**

He’s so much better at this than the rest of them, the precision and intelligence she attributes to a love of gothic literature and too much time on his hands. She thinks he may have been born for this, that he runs from them because he has no other choice but that he faces them because he has a family. (And family is such a weird word to describe who they’ve become, but it’s true, even with new members—by now they operate nearly flawless, with just enough fuckups to remind them of mortality.)

 

**

The truck breaks down halfway through Nevada, and if it weren’t for his mechanical skills, they’d be stranded. (They’d been stranded once before, when he wasn’t a part of their family yet, and every night could have been a last stand if providence didn’t smile on them for once.) She watches him work, ignores playful jabs from her brother and pointed looks from Keyleth. Relief comes when she gets a shot off on a spirit wandering closer and it leaves when another tries to barter with her. A reassuring presence behind her coerces her into drawing her crossbow, and she screams her fury as the spirit demands her heart one last time.

They never go back to Nevada, next time they will take the northern route and see the mountains. She sleeps with him after that, in the bed of the truck during a scouting mission. She hopes it won’t change things, but it does.

 

**

She wonders at his old home, now a base camp for a larger operation, and he watches her awe. She came from nothing, and he has given her everything he has to offer. The last of the demons are upon them, but they have found power and allies and each other in a wasteland no one sought to reclaim.

He has mellowed because there is too much at stake, but he still loves when she comes back to him, a splatter of black blood on her cheek, and he will kiss her lips this time because there is nothing to lose. And if she thinks the demons still want him, she will fight them off tooth and nail, and they will leave her.


End file.
